A match made in heaven: Using parallel corpora and multinomial logistic regression to analyze the expression of possession in Old Spanish

Abstract

This study applies multinomial regression analysis to a parallel corpus of Spanish medieval translations of the Bible in order to study the different factors that condition variation in the expression of possession in Old Spanish. Our methodology allows us to determine the degree to which less frequent possessive constructions (ART+POSS, as in la su casa 'the his house', GEN, as in la casa de él 'the house of him' and ART/BARE, as in la casa 'the house') can be considered competitors to the dominant POSS construction (as in su casa 'his house') as a function of usage context differences. In comparison to the POSS construction, the ART+POSS construction usually expresses pragmatic functions such as reverence, the GEN construction is typically used to either disambiguate a reference and the ART/BARE construction is bound to contexts in which the possessor is highly accessible. Crucially, the analysis also sheds light on historical changes in the balance between structural and contextual constraints on the use of these different variants. Whereas in the 13th century, structural and stylistic constraints are almost equally important, the importance of structural constraints diminishes in the 15th century. The study thus illustrates how in reductive processes of language change, variation due to structural constraints yields to stylistic variation.

Mining an English-Chinese parallel Dataset of Financial News

“…We observed an increased interest in domain-specific parallel datasets in the past year. The main use of such material is to make a specialized learning dataset to improve a statistical machine translation system and to do cross-lingual information retrieval (McEnery & Xiao, 2007) from a computational point of view, to extract automatically or semi-automatically a specialized lexicon in different languages (Rosemeyer & Enrique-Arias, 2016) from a linguistic point of view. In the following review, we consider as domain-specific a dataset focused on all aspects of one topic.…”

New insights into an old form: A variationist analysis of the pleonastic possessive in Guatemalan Spanish

“…Over time, it became associated with new discourse-pragmatic functions. While Sandoval (1941:87) considered its use as purely pleonastic, Company Company (2005:149) objected that it emphasizes the importance of the possessee to the possessor (see also Rosemeyer & Enrique-Arias, 2016). Pato Maldonado (2002) added that Indef+Poss+N signals high informational relevance, referring to habitual, permanent, or inalienable objects of personal possession, to essential parts, or belongings of the possessor that are crucial for his or her well-being.…”

“… 17. Rosemeyer and Enrique-Arias (2016) also emphasized the importance to take into account possessive unmarked nouns preceded only by an article. …”